The National Tiger Conservation Authority has claimed that around 3,000 wild tigers now roam across India. The NTCA and its cheerleaders in the non-governmental organisation sector celebrate this as a great achievement, trotting out tiger counts that ticked up from a measly low of almost 1,400 in 2006 to attain this level by 2022. The media’s tiger pundits, local and global, blindly echo these numbers and claims of success. Several international NGOs championing the tiger’s cause have joined the chorus opportunistically, if not by conviction. Curiously, despite the claimed successes, the Delhi-based Global Tiger Forum, an outfit lavishly funded by the Indian government, has suggested ‘capping’ the number at 3,500 tigers, as though tiger recovery is an oil-drilling operation. I submit all these claims are scientifically suspect.
Even if this number of nearly 3,000 tigers, derived using a fundamentally flawed methodology conjured up by NTCA in 2005, is accepted, it boils down to a growth rate of less than 1% per year during the last 50 years after tiger recovery efforts began. Given the massive investments of money, material and manpower that likely increased 50-fold if contributions of state governments, lending agencies, the corporate sector and NGOs are accounted for, the above ‘achievement’ appears to be rather modest.
The suggestion that India’s forests are close to attaining their potential carrying capacity for tigers, thus requiring ‘capping’, appears strange. Potentially, India’s 400,000 square kilometres of remaining tiger habitats can hold 10,000 to 20,000 tigers, respectively, if average population densities can be recovered naturally to easily attainable levels of 2.5 to 5 tigers per 100 square kilometres.
Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, the massive media coverage of tiger issues in India almost entirely ignores rigorous tiger science. Therefore, official tiger tales are being echoed in quickening news cycles and amplified by social media. The public’s fascination for the tiger, rooted deeply in India’s ancient culture and religion, now injected with strong doses of sentimental animal welfarism and tourist aesthetics, is feeding the frenzy.
Old stalwarts of India’s tiger bureaucracy had claimed there were about 1,800 tigers in the early 1970s, and that this number rose steadily to reach almost 3,600 by the year 2002. They had used an unreliable invention called the ‘pugmark census’ to generate these numbers. And, then, in 2006, the newly-created NTCA claimed tiger numbers had collapsed to about 1,400 in just four years.
The truth is more complicated. India’s first generation of forest officials recovered tigers spectacularly, through hard work and great sacrifices roughly between 1974 and 2000. They overcame shortages of manpower and funding and many put their lives on the line. They focused on matters most critical for tigers: law enforcement, anti-poaching efforts, defragmentation of habitats through village relocations, curbs on livestock grazing and biomass extractions. These were resisted by local people as well as their own forester colleagues. Population densities of prey species rose, followed by tiger densities, naturally in response to focused protection — a process that takes two or three decades. Moreover, such tiger recoveries were restricted to just a few notified tiger refugia outside of which the tiger continued to lose ground steadily.
As threats to tigers rose, in 2005 a Tiger Task Force constituted by the prime minister had made two unfortunate lapses among its final recommendations. The first was to expand the mission of tiger managers from the earlier focused protection of tigers and their habitats to a plethora of ‘ecodevelopment’ activities. These, in effect, included rural development work, high-end tourism, scientific research, habitat ‘enrichment’, nature education and media management. With massive new funds flowing in, tiger managers chose to focus on the expanded mandate, leading to the mission drifting away from the earlier focused protection.
Worse still, honest ecological audits of the tiger manager’s performance through scientific monitoring of tigers and their natural habitats were entrusted in 2005 to a monopoly under NTCA and the Wildlife Institute of India, both entities led by the same forest bureaucracy. This created a major conflict of interest which has marred tiger conservation ever since, distorting priorities while investing the new funds.
To be fair, the TTF did recommend the abandonment of the earlier unscientific ‘pugmark tiger census’ invented by the forest bureaucracy and hitherto endorsed by WII. However, the TTF, lacking knowledge of advances in modern animal population monitoring methods, gave a free hand to the NTCA and the WII to come up with a ‘new’ tiger monitoring protocol.
The resulting non-transparent and deeply-flawed National Tiger Estimation methodology has generated all tiger numbers reported publicly since 2006. It has been scientifically critiqued multiple times. Yet, the underlying data and analyses remain opaque, hidden from independent scientific scrutiny. This poorly conceived methodology has generated unreliable tiger numbers in 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 at an astronomical cost to taxpayers.
It is clear that the forest bureaucracy cleverly took advantage of the naiveté of TTF members to drastically ‘reset’ India’s tiger numbers down to an improbable low of an estimated 1400 in 2006. This sleight of hand set the stage for all its subsequent claims of ‘unique tiger conservation successes’.
The key bureaucratic actors who were involved in all these machinations were favourites of the two UPA governments that ruled at that time. Astonishingly, they performed a breathtaking trapeze act to become blue-eyed boys of the NDA regime that stormed to power in 2014. The circus around tiger numbers has gone merrily on as before.
I have tried to study, understand and save tigers for five decades. In that process, I have served, at various times, as a non-official advisor to Project Tiger, the Wildlife Institute of India and the National Tiger Conservation Authority. I failed, however, in all my attempts to introduce superior methods, which I had practically proven and applied in my own research of three decades to monitor wild tiger populations.
I will continue to be an interested spectator in the next act of the great Indian tiger conservation circus when a new government assumes power in Delhi. I am sure the same bureaucratic trapeze artistry will be on display, once again.
K. Ullas Karanth is a wildlife biologist and the author of Among Tigers:Fighting to Bring Back Asia’s Big Cats
